In The Cold Thickness Of Winter Poem by Patti Masterman

In the cold thickness of winter
Words orbit us in the close surroundings;
As we get trapped in our own cosmic debris fields;
Hating and loving what we can never escape from.
The air forces it's frigid hands into your pockets,
The gaps between your buttons,
Where your pants meet your boots.

It crawls down into the tops of your pants
Like a surprise blast from the arctic depths.
It's thinking of rigor and death;
It's thinking about illness, and never waking up again:
The white annihilation of the drifting snow
All your thoughts, gradually piling up
On the horizontal surfaces.

Will they always be there, as your personal memorial
At the edge of the cave in, under eons of ice
Where there were no survivors
To outlive the avalanche?
For even if ice had memory, and recognized time;
It would never want to speak again
Of anything that impermanent.